Critique of Walt and Mearsheimer's 'Israel Lobby' - Salon.com

[Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers@xxxxxxxxx>]

Is the "Israel lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies?
Two leading academics have tried to break the taboo against criticizing
Israel's powerful U.S. lobby. It's a worthy aim, but their clumsy
argument may backfire.

By Michelle Goldberg
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/18/lobby/print.html
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Apr. 18, 2006 | The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC,
may be the most powerful lobby in the country. As its Web site says,
"Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress -- at home
and in Washington -- AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel
legislative initiatives a year. From procuring nearly $3 billion in aid
critical to Israel's security, to funding joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to
build a defense against unconventional weapons, AIPAC members are
involved in the most crucial issues facing Israel." At its conferences,
a parade of politicians from both parties pay homage -- this year,
speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader John
Boehner and former Sen. John Edwards.

All successful lobbies flaunt their power. But unlike, say, the Cuban
lobby or the AARP, there's a taboo against outsiders discussing the
influence of AIPAC or the Israel lobby more generally, or criticizing
the way it shapes American policy. To do so raises the specter of
poisonous old narratives about mysterious cabals and dual loyalties, of
hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and "The
International Jew." So a strange, dim silence surrounds the Israel
lobby, and the hushed atmosphere nurtures conspiracy theories about a
power so great and so secret that you can't even talk about it in
public. Those conspiracy theories make the issue even more fraught,
because respectable people don't want to provide fodder for the likes of
former Klan leader David Duke, who writes on his Web site, "Just as
Jewish Israel-Firsters dominate the mass media, so Congress and the
President are afflicted by the Israeli Lobby. "

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, political science professors at
Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, apparently hoped to
break through the taboos with their baldly titled paper "The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." It was published last month in the
London Review of Books and, in an expanded version, on the Web site of
the Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is academic dean. The
article argues that the United States' close relationship with Israel is
not in America's national interest -- that it is, indeed,
counterproductive -- and that it is sustained largely through the work
of the Israel lobby (Walt and Mearsheimer refer to it, simply and
ominously, as "the Lobby.") Walt and Mearsheimer also argue that the
lobby was a major force pushing for war in Iraq, a war they vocally opposed.

"In our piece, we argued that when people are critical of Israeli policy
or the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the arguments are not taken on their
merits," Mearsheimer says when reached by phone. "What happens instead
is that the great silencer -- the charge of anti-Semitism -- is leveled
at the critics."

In this case, that's just what has happened. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel
called the paper "the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel,"
adding, "Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people
would write reports like this." In a response to Walt and Mearsheimer
published on the Kennedy School Web site last week, law professor Alan
Dershowitz asked, "What would motivate two recognized academics to issue
a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be
used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence,
that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will
place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty
to America?" Neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor Eliot A. Cohen
penned a column about the paper in the Washington Post titled, "Yes,
It's Anti-Semitic."

On the surface, the whole imbroglio seemed like the latest version of a
story that has replayed itself countless times in the last few years. A
public figure strays outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion about
Israel, or calls attention to the disproportionate influence wielded by
supporters of Israel's right-wing political factions, and is immediately
attacked as a bigot or a paranoid. It happened to Howard Dean during the
Democratic primary, when he said that the United States should be
"evenhanded" in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, admonished him; an
Israeli newspaper suggested that his Jewish backing would dry up; and
Nancy Pelosi wrote him an angry open letter. All this despite the fact
that Dean's campaign was being co-chaired by a former president of
AIPAC, and there was little daylight between his position on Israel and
that of President Bush.
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/18/lobby/print.html


Leigh
http://leighm.wordpress.com/